Page:Margaret Mead - Coming of age in Samoa; a psychological study of primitive youth for western civilisation.pdf/258

 course scen only once or twice, between relatives towards whom the child has complicated emotional attitudes, may produce any number of false assumptions. Our records of maladjusted children are full of cases where children have misunderstood the nature of the sexual act, have interpreted it as struggle accompanied by anger, or as chastisement, have recoiled in terror from one highly charged experience. So our children are dependent upon accident for their experience of life and death; and those experiences which they are vouchsafed, lie within the intimate family circle and so are the worst possible way of learning gencral facts about which it is important to acquire no special, distorted attitudes. One death, two births, one sex experience, is a generous total for the child brought up under living conditions which we consider consonant with an American standard of living. And considering the number of illustrations which we consider it necessary to give of how to calculate the number of square feet of paper necessary to paper a room eight feet by twelve feet by fourteen feet, or how to parse an English sentence, this is a low standard of illustration. It might be argued that these are experiences of such high emotional tone that repetition is unnecessary. It might also be argued if a child were severcly beaten before being given its first lesson in calculating how to paper a room, and as a sequel to the lesson, saw its father hit its mother with the poker, it would always remember that arithmetic lesson. But what it would